Most cryptographic computations are very computationally intensive. As such, they are poorly suited to aggressive chip multithreading (CMT) processors, where a core may be only single-issue. Each core may support multiple strands (via VT (vertical threading) or SMT (symmetric multithreading)). Aggressive chip multithreading processors are better suited to multithreaded workloads, where each thread exhibits a large CPI (cycles per instruction), spending most of its time stalled waiting for memory operations to complete. Aggressive chip multithreading processors may not work as optimally when performing computationally intensive cryptographic operations, such as encryption and decryption processes. However, the security benefits provided by such processes are an integral part of many commercial applications. Aggressive chip multithreading processors are thus likely to frequently encounter intensive cryptographic operations, despite their typically performing poorly when executing such operations.